Your reader Joel gave a very balanced view on the crusades. He stated that though crusades are severely vilified by Muslims they happened about four hundred years after Islamic forces raged much of Europe. Muslims as protagonists of a religion of peace had no business sending their armies to Europe. But the deplorable fact of history is that Muslim armies not only raged Europe at will, within hundred years of Islam's birth, these same armies had also reached the western borders of India (Sindh). In the west the church was strong and the tradition of non-violence was not so well established, So 400 years after the first attacks, the church in Europe rose with strength in the form of crusades and restored the balance of power. The fate of the East was worse. In the East, there was no strong church to counter the Islamic armies. There it met the non-violent traditions invented by Gautam Buddha and his Hindu contemporaries more than three hundred years before Christ was born. Just imagine what Islamic forces must have encountered when they crossed Persian borders into the then India.

If I know my history right, Taxilla was a great Buddist university in that part of the world when it met the Islamic sword. And there were no crusades to fight back. Islam reached eastern Asia and Indonesia through traders and in peace. That is perhaps right but we can thank the Indian ocean and Himalayas for that mercy. If these places were reachable on horsebacks, Islam would have reached there by 750 AD.

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Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".